


you never, ever told me

by kaffas (hoopoe)



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Bloodplay, Canonical Character Death, Feral Behavior, Love, M/M, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:55:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26207542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoopoe/pseuds/kaffas
Summary: Aiden's voice purrs out sensuous and low, a carnal promise. "Do you ever look into a man's eyes the second he realizes he's met his death? It's the nearest thing to religion, really."Andfuck,does something in Lambert respond to Aiden, reach out and grab on andwant.This, Lambert chooses to keep.
Relationships: Aiden/Lambert (The Witcher), I dub thee Catwolf
Comments: 12
Kudos: 70





	you never, ever told me

**Author's Note:**

> ~~it's not really bloodplay there just happens to be blood in the vicinity of the play~~
> 
> is the title from "the ghost of you" by my chemical romance, you ask. i sip pensively at a cup of jasmine tea. in return, i posit this question: do we ever truly escape our teen angst
> 
> worldbuilding notes: opening takes place directly after 'following the thread' (TW3). everything else proceeds chronologically. we're making it up as we go along babey.
> 
> in my mind, the meat of the story plays out over the course of a year or two (if that). i picture aiden as "julian from the arcana but make him italian." you don't have to follow these headcanons.

_"They say_ we _have tempers, but what about_ you, _little wolf?"_

Blood, so much blood on his hands. His mind is going, focused insanity, the pieces of Lambert slipping away to make room for the wolf, the part that _howls,_ that cuts away in mourning at everything between him and the man who took—

He pulls himself together enough to exchange sharp words with Geralt. "The best man I'd ever met," he calls Aiden. "There's no comparison."

He is blind, in his grief. It burns hot through him, urges him _faster, harder, now, finish it._ Geralt senses it in him, and maybe this is why Geralt follows him through it, speaking for Lambert and arranging the blinding pain of loss into plans, ultimatums.

He is pulled too tight, a bowstring on the verge of snapping. He finishes it with a dagger. Geralt stands back as Lambert lands the finishing blow to Jad Karadin's neck, reveling in the brutal finality of it, sinew and bone parting rough under his short, short blade.

_"They're intimate. Do you ever look into a man's eyes the second he realizes he's met his death? It's the nearest thing to religion, really."_

"Thanks for your help, Geralt," he says tightly, and then, for the hell of it, "Wanna talk about it?" Geralt—who knows _pain_ but not _this,_ not the whole heaping pile of shit that's led up to this moment, where Lambert holds a dripping dagger in his trembling right hand—shakes his head, bids Lambert farewell, and washes his hands of it.

Blood smears fresh and crimson across Karadin's clothing as Lambert searches the body, fumbling, desperate. It isn't _here,_ it's not _here—_

_"_ La petite mort, _they call this in Toussaint."_

_"You were right. It feels—gods, I'm so_ close _to you—"_

" _Where is it!_ " Lambert roars as the door to Karadin's quarters flies to splinters. " _Where did he put it!_ "

But it is only Karadin's family here, his wife and children, and they aren't innocent but neither can Lambert assign them guilt by proxy. Old hurts rise up to join new on their pedestal at the forefront of his mind, and when he asks a third time, his voice is low, coaxing, a tone learned from—

_"Come now, you didn't think you'd lose me that easily? Cats can see in the dark."_

"The medallion. From the witcher he killed. Aiden. Where is the medallion."

The wife, _Laetitia_ is her name, _rejoicing,_ what a ploughing farce, gropes around in a bureau drawer and draws out a bundle of silk. She thrusts it roughly at Lambert, tears streaking down her cheeks.

Let her cry. Life's taken that away from him, too.

**

In a cave near Ellander, right before entering the Mahakam Mountains, there is a hot spring. They'd found it after the contract on the ogre, by scent and sight, their armor and swords piling unceremoniously on the hard-packed ground and their weary groans echoing off stone walls.

Lambert places the Cat medallion at the edge of the spring and sinks into the steaming water, his eyes fixed on gleaming metal. He has made so few choices in his life. Around the hollowness of slow-aging grief, this, he chooses to keep.

**

"Excuse me, that's my kill," an affable voice comes from behind Lambert, who takes one deep, steadying breath and cranes his neck away from his father's cold corpse. "The goddess Lilvani as my witness, can't trust anything these days."

"Fuck off, Cat."

"What are you planning on doing, then? Killing him more? I took care of that _days_ ago, look. He's all...bloated."

The first thing Lambert set out to do on the Path, this gauntlet he's been forced to run by a father who deserved the death that so nearly claimed him, and it's already been done by this swaggering son-of-a-bitch with a Cat School medallion winking derisively at Lambert from around his neck.

"Why come back?" Lambert retorts over his shoulder, turning fully to take in this newcomer. Messy curls, glossy and black as a raven's feathers, spill onto one olive cheek, the other side cropped close, asymmetrical. A deep scar stretches from the corner of his lips to his sharp cheekbone, twisting his mouth in a permanent smirk. His dark eyes glint yellow in the low light before dawn.

"Ah, you see, I've been using him as a bank of sorts, while I'm here. When coin gets scarce, I reach into this poor wretch's purse and take what I need."

It's just morbid enough to strike a chord with Lambert, the child of Kaer Morhen's most fucked-up Surprise in three decades. "He's a wife-beater," Lambert allows, turning back to stare down at the corpse's mottled flesh. "He beat his kid, too."

"Well, _I_ know that, but how do _you?_ "

"You know that?"

"He killed his wife, so I killed him." He makes it sound so simple, so _just._ A life for a life. No contract, no flimsy negotiation. _He killed his wife, so I killed him._

Lambert has spent every moment of his life hoping to close his eyes and open them somewhere _else,_ somewhere that makes gods-damned _sense._ To live through one ploughing moment that doesn't feel like the universe is playing a trick on him, his existence a cruel joke of fathers and witchers and sorcerers and alchemy.

The Cat School witcher sweeps a mocking bow to Lambert, sauntering over to riffle through his dead father's purse, and this is the first moment.

**

Lambert knows the ogre contract is fucked. He can smell it in the earl's sweat. Stress smells bitterer than fear or honesty, and no matter how good a liar the earl thinks he is, his sweat gives him away.

"An ogre, huh?" Lambert shrugs, hefting the sack of coins in a loose hand. "That all you can give me?"

The earl's lips tighten, minuscule frown lines denting his chin. "I believe it was linked to the imposition of a tax on... Well, that doesn't matter to you. The witch they paid to curse the beast hangs from the ramparts already."

_Useless._ Completely useless, but he's come to expect that. "Right, so, motive. Anything you can tell me about the curse itself? Other than 'big, scary monster, here to ravage the countryside?'"

"Only that I want the very best for all denizens in my care, man or beast, Master Witcher," the earl simpers, and this shit might work on Geralt, but Lambert doesn't have the patience of their sainted White Wolf.

"Right," Lambert cuts him off. "I'll just _figure it out,_ then. I expect an added fifty crowns. Half up front." The earl instructs his flapping chamberlain, Parsifal, to count out twenty-five coins, and Lambert tugs the drawstrings of the purse free to receive his jingling bounty. "See you in a week."

Find the ogre, lift the curse. Lambert swears a blue streak for the first three minutes of his overcast hike toward the mountains, where the earl has directed him to the beast's lair. Lambert's never been good at _magic_ shit, doesn't have enough of it in him, wants nothing to do with Destiny or Chaos or whatever it's supposed to control.

He treks in one side of the forest and out the other as a drizzle starts up, the rainy Temerian summer in full fling. It hits him hot and humid as he clears the tree line, following the ogre's scent.

_If it controls behavior, it's probably related to Axii,_ a voice in his head lectures, sounding suspiciously like Eskel. _How do you break Axii?_

"You don't," Lambert mutters aloud, tromping up the muddy path. "Someone else does." The sky opens up and dumps down rain, and the scent path grows thinner as water beats it out. Ogres are big fuck-ugly things, though, so its tracks don't _wash away_ so much as _smear._

Lambert downs a Cat and grimaces as toxins seep into his blood. He can see the tracks better, but he feels slower, heavier with the rainwater on his gear and skin weighing him down.

Not far now. The tracks here are deeper, nearly indistinct: The ogre travels here frequently, from several directions, converging on a single trail. Lambert reaches into the satchel at his side and runs contemplative fingers over the neat rows of his potions: Thunderbolt, Swallow, White Raff's. He's here to do recon, but if shit goes south, Lambert chooses his life over the earl's coin. Old man Vesemir might keel over if one more Wolf dies before him.

The first thing Lambert notices about the ogre's lair is that he isn't the first witcher here. It isn't the tracks or the smell of White Gull that give it away, but the _noise._

" _Fuck,_ mother _fucker—_ " Sound of metal ripping through flesh, a body hitting the ground. Too light to be an ogre, so it must be— "No, come _back_ here, you, _ugh—_ "

It sounds like he's having a rough time of it, but Lambert's getting paid for this thing _alive,_ so he intervenes.

Shit goes south.

As soon as he enters the main cavern, he is nearly bowled over by the odor of fresh-killed human, but has no time to take in the sight before—

"I hope you have a sword!" calls the other witcher from where he's dug his daggers into the ogre's hairy shoulder blades, climbing up toward the cervical spine with sick sucking sounds. "I hope you can stop standing there and _use it!_ "

The insult spurs Lambert into motion, trained to routine: He tips back Thunderbolt and draws his silver sword.

The ogre's huge, but it's slow. Lambert takes advantage of its distraction to go for weak points, tendons, knees. He slices through them with quick cuts, bringing the ogre crashing mightily down, where the other witcher makes quick work of slitting its throat, plunging his other dagger into the brain stem with messy efficiency.

Lambert looks up from wiping his sword and—

"Ah, it's you." The Cat School medallion hangs from his chest, over their distinctive light armor. His arms are bare to the damp heat of summer, and he's splattered tip to toe in gore, but Lambert recognizes him as well, all the same. "Forty years, is it? You're still alive."

"So are you, thanks to me."

"Don't be dramatic. Another minute and I'd have ridden this bull to death." He nudges at the ogre's drool-dripping tusk with the toe of his boot. Casts his eyes around the cave, finally notices the two human bodies littering the ground. "Well, that _is_ unfortunate."

"Right, how the fuck am I supposed to get paid when the earl's painting the floor of this ploughing cave?" Anger bubbles below the surface of his skin, simmering under the layers of mutagens meant to keep him calm. "And how the fuck is he _here,_ he was strutting around his castle levying taxes _three hours_ ago!"

The Cat witcher sidles over to the second body, bending at the waist to eye it curiously. "The chamberlain. A mage. He portalled them in. Not to insult your prodigious intelligence, but I think we may have been played."

"Your intelligence too," Lambert ripostes. "They hired you to—"

"Kill it. And you to—"

"Lift the curse on it. Were probably hoping to get rid of both of us and get their money back." Lambert groans. "Should have known. No one named _Parsifal_ is good news."

The Cat School witcher tosses a final grimace to the chamberlain's body and sheathes his twin silver daggers against his thigh. "How about ones named Aiden?" he asks, kneeling to retrieve a leather satchel not unlike Lambert's from behind a boulder. "That's my name, if it wasn't clear." He rummages around in the bag, withdrawing a heavy coin purse.

"Aiden," Lambert repeats. "From?"

"Aiden of Nowhere," he answers glibly. "Of Dyn Marv, before it got..." The Cat witcher—Aiden—slices a hand across his neck sharply. "We were sorry to hear about Kaer Morhen, what's left of us. Well, me, at least. Don't know about those other crazy bastards."

_You're one of those crazy bastards,_ Lambert doesn't say, instead honing in on the clatter of coin on the cave floor as Aiden upends the purse. His scarred face turns up to Lambert and he raises one eyebrow as if to ask, _Well?_

"Half and half?" Aiden proposes. "As neither of us will be paid in full."

Lambert narrows his eyes, suspicious that he's being scammed out of his fifty-coin research fee. "How much were they paying you to kill it?" he demands. Aiden answers, and Lambert sighs—Aiden's fee is more than twice what Lambert negotiated—pulling his own reward money from his belt.

Deliberately, his eyes dancing gleefully on Lambert the whole time, Aiden sorts out the coin into two piles like a dealer at a card tournament, one for Lambert, one for Aiden, over and over. It takes an _excruciatingly_ long time.

_Too_ long. Long enough for Lambert to get antsy. "Don't you have somewhere else to _be?_ " he—does not _whine,_ but near enough, that scar tugging Aiden's mouth up into a smug, lopsided grin.

"Do I make you uncomfortable?" Lambert crosses his arms, trying for intimidating, but on his slight frame it's merely petulant. "I like to watch you. You have a...restiveness."

"Are you comparing me to a fucking horse?" Lambert protests, sweeping up his allotted pile of gold.

"Well, Wolf, if the shoe fits." Lambert lobs a single gold coin at Aiden's head, hard, just to watch his slit pupils dilate and track it as he catches it midair. "Hilarious, Wolf."

"Lambert," he corrects. "My name's Lambert. Also of nowhere."

They exchange a long glance of mutual understanding. It rankles at Lambert, who feels _seen_ for his own ugliness, the oozing necrotic black under the surface of him. He ties his purse to his belt, checks his swords are in place, steel then silver, nods curtly at Aiden.

"May the Path treat you well," he bids, as he was taught, and leaves Aiden standing gobsmacked among the corpses.

It is the dead of night when Lambert emerges from mountains into forest, still uncomfortably damp in several inconvenient places. He thinks wistfully of inns and baths and fires and a full-body Igni, because anything is superior to the cycle of chafing and healing just to chafe again, and turns north toward the Pontar, where the weather is still fickle but the dandies lining the road to Oxenfurt pay in advance.

By the moon, it's 12:30 a.m. when a tree rustles.

Lambert stills, instantly on guard, hand flying to his silver sword.

"Fuck," says the tree. Caught out, a flurry of limbs arranges itself to shimmy quickly down the branches, bending grotesquely when a hand- or foothold is farther away than its reach. There is a beauty in it, too, a predatory grace.

"Come now," Aiden—conspiring with the weather to chafe at Lambert, likely as not—cajoles. "You didn't think you'd lose me that easily? Cats can see in the dark."

Lambert consciously breathes, relaxes, pulls his hand away from the hilt of his silver sword and to his side. When he shifts his weight, his hunting trousers scrape at raw skin. Aiden catches the subtle motion of his wince, but makes no remark.

"Right, Cat. Why are you following me?"

A Cat he may not be, but Lambert can see well enough to watch as Aiden mirrors his posture, swaying to one side and crossing his arms. "You're heading toward Oxenfurt. There's always work in Oxenfurt, probably enough for two." Aiden pauses, and Lambert feels more than sees the pointed gaze that rakes down his body and back up. "If we travel together, we can make camp. Trade watch. Maybe even sleep."

It's getting toward one in the morning, and Lambert (soggy, in pain), loathe as he is to do so, follows the logic. He grunts his assent and turns off the footpath, Aiden falling silently into step beside him. When Lambert's shoulders begin to rub raw, his layered leather armor not made for Temerian flash floods, Aiden scoffs and plops down on the ground, apropos of nothing.

"Here's as good as anywhere," he declares. "I simply cannot walk another step."

Lambert had hoped to make it to one of the villages between Ellander and Rinde tonight. He says as much, and Aiden insists again. "No, here. Off with your effects, Wolf, we're not traveling any farther."

"If you rob me, I'll slit your throat," Lambert warns as first bag, then swords, then armor hit the forest floor. He shrugs his bedroll from his shoulders, spreading it and flopping down to lean on his elbows. "You're taking watch."

"Your trousers," Aiden responds abruptly.

"They'll dry," Lambert argues. "Don't trust you not to let a nekker bite off my prick. Or do it yourself. Ploughing Cats."

Aiden goes silent again, the tension stretching thin enough to make Lambert nervous. Internally, he gauges the distance from hand to sword, from his body to Aiden's, in case—

Ripple of movement. A glass vial hits Lambert in the chest, bouncing off and landing on his lap. He picks it up, uncorks it, sniffs.

"Chamomile and celandine," Aiden mutters. "For healing. Yes, I'll take watch." He tucks himself into a meditative position, facing away from Lambert, and speaks no more.

The oil takes the sting away, when Lambert reaches under his clothes to rub it into thighs, hips, shoulders. At the edge of his mind, uncertainty creeps; he may have miscalculated.

He corks the oil and sets it carefully next to the heap of his belongings.

Lambert apologizes the only way he can: He turns his back and goes to sleep.

**

In the morning, it occurs to Lambert that Aiden is clean.

"You're clean," he accuses. "You were clean when you found me. Before that, you stank of ogre blood. What gives?"

Aiden, who appears to have read Lambert's apology for what it was, chews thoughtfully at his rationed venison, that slow grin spreading across his entire ( _clean_ ) face.

Feral yellow glints in his dark brown eyes as he says, "I was hoping you'd ask."

**

(In a cave near Ellander, right before entering the Mahakam Mountains, there is a hot spring. They double back, seeking it out by scent and sight, armor and swords piling unceremoniously on the hard-packed ground and weary groans echoing off stone walls.

Lambert sinks into the steaming water, his eyes fixed on Aiden as he does the same, his trim body and fine features transformed in contentment. He has made so few choices in his life. This, he dares to keep.)

**

_We worked together a lot,_ Lambert tells Geralt. It's not untrue. It isn't the whole truth, either. It's _easy,_ pared down to what Geralt understands, reciprocity.

Aiden laughs wildly as he leaps from tree to tree, crashing down on each bandit in turn, a voracious ambush predator. He uses his environment, trips and ensnares and entangles, his steel daggers flashing bright as he _beams._ Lambert comes in on his heels, blood and dust on his boots as he listens for haggard breathing, slits the throats of those who still cling to life.

He gets to his feet just as Aiden gets under the guard of the last man standing, an archer, Aiden's face blank but that _laughter_ still ringing from his throat as he brings the daggers up. One lung, then the other. The man drops his bow and gasps for breath, and then, with another jerky movement from Aiden and a gout of crimson, it's over, and the lines of Aiden's body relax into that self-assured grace Lambert's come to associate with him.

"That's the fifth this month, in the books!" Aiden calls as he starts matter-of-factly checking the pockets of each man he'd slaughtered. Can't be more than ten of them, but it's still uncanny how they were here one moment and gone the next, speed and ferocity and whooping laughter through it all.

"You know, we should take on a _contract_ at some point," Lambert grouses. "Where do you get off killing humans?"

"These humans weren't the kind you want to protect," Aiden murmurs, lifting a hand and dangling a woman's necklace from one wry finger.

"Maybe he was betrothed," Lambert poses, and receives a withering gaze for his efforts. Bested, he sets about going through the camp, checking chests and packages and barrels for anything useful. Enough food and water for a ten-person camp, a few odds and ends that might have been intended for sale or barter but will now be put in potions or torn apart for scrap.

Aiden drags the bodies into a neat row for the carrion birds and they make camp there, on dead men's land. In the morning, they will construct a pyre and burn what remains of the bandits. For now, they rest.

During the uneasy nights when sleep fails to find them, they trade secrets, furtive and private between them. Aiden picks up his neglected steel sword and follows the motions of a Wolf School guard sequence, shadowing Lambert until he deems himself passable. "If you think you're up to it," Lambert challenges, "keep me back. No signs."

The night is almost pitch-black in the waning moonlight, but he's learned the shift in the air between them when Aiden's mouth pulls into that crooked, taunting smile. "No signs," he agrees, and Lambert draws his own steel sword, launching into motion.

Aiden steps through the first set of guards perfectly, heading off Lambert's carefully placed attacks with the ring of steel against steel. Faster, _faster,_ through the second and third and fourth sequences, and on the fifth...

Aiden places his off foot at the wrong angle. A weak spot, and Lambert rushes in, aims to hit him hard and fast, goes for his right shoulder—

There is a dagger under his chin.

Lambert stands there, his sword poised at Aiden's shoulder, the tip of Aiden's dagger pricking vulnerable skin. They look at each other in the darkness, breathing hard. Aiden's smile has grown sharp, his curls in complete disarray on the unscarred side of his face.

When Lambert drops his sword in surrender, Aiden presses in closer. Lambert _smells_ more than _feels_ the blood that wells up under the pressure, his senses straining to take in Aiden, warm and disheveled and wild in combat and victory, silhouetted in the night and redolent of sweat, adrenaline, heady arousal.

"I'll teach you daggers." Aiden's voice purrs out sensuous and low, a carnal promise. "They're intimate. Do you ever look into a man's eyes the second he realizes he's met his death? It's the nearest thing to religion, really."

And _fuck,_ does something in Lambert respond to Aiden, reach out and grab on and _want._ He brings up his free hand to brush Aiden's thigh, his hip, tilts his jaw and scores a line of red under his own chin.

"If you teach me, I'll learn," Lambert whispers in return, a vow and a confession, a plea. They hold there, seconds or minutes or months of slow heartbeats.

Aiden is the first to step away, fey and utterly _wicked_ until he slips back into his skin.

It's Lambert's turn for watch tonight, but before Aiden sleeps, his gentle fingers insistently clean the blood from Lambert's neck.

**

"Here, do you think?" Aiden suggests. The signpost he indicates reads _Cunny of the Goose._ Unbidden, a chuckle makes its way from Lambert's throat, an answering smile playing about Aiden's eyes. "Just for a drink."

Fresh off a contract on a noonwraith, Aiden's purse takes the hit as a homely barmaid slams down two tankards and a slew of bottles onto the rickety table. Lambert pours for himself, a bit of everything, and slides each bottle in turn to Aiden, who does the same. It's almost disgusting enough to be White Gull, if they took what's in the tankards and distilled it another couple of times. It burns on the way down, but by the second swig his throat is too numb to care.

They'd parted for a month and met up again between Alness and Carsten, on the wrong side of the Pontar, Lambert hunting down a 'ghost' that turned out to be a displaced leshen for the rich fucks that owned an estate there, Aiden sorting through a pile of notices and humming as he walked, deceptively nonthreatening. At Lambert's footsteps on the road, Aiden stood stock-still, listening, and glanced up from his parchments. A new scar cut through his brow, redefining the space of his slow smirk.

"Going my way?" he leered. Lambert's heart picked up and sent scorching heat through his veins—Aiden, true to form, doing awful things to his blood pressure.

"To Novigrad?"

"Well, we might stop along the way."

Lambert didn't collect on the leshen contract, choosing instead to sniff out and burn the noonwraith's token, a doll binding her to her childhood home, while Aiden dispatched the specter.

In the present, Aiden downs half of his liquor in one long swallow, sets his tankard down on the sticky tavern table, and leans back in his chair to study Lambert. "Have you been practicing, Wolf?" he asks, flicking his eyes pointedly down to Lambert's lower half, concealed under the table. The daggers, silver and steel, seem to burn into his thigh through the leather straps holding them in place.

"When I can," Lambert concedes, ignoring the patronizing quirk of Aiden's newly-scarred eyebrow. "Instinct doesn't tell me to get as close as I can to what's trying to kill me. We use...numbers, persistence." _Not impulse._

"You'll seldom see two of _us_ in the same place, since the School fell," Aiden agrees, a bitter truce laced with the scent of spirits. "Seems we're all out to kill each other."

"But not you." He digs under the surface, trying to find a kindred affliction inside Aiden, ulcers and rot to match Lambert's own.

Aiden's upturned lips meet the rim of his tankard, and he does not answer but for the flash and glimmer of eyeshine.

The tavern grows livelier as evening fades to night, filling to the brim with the disreputable clientele pouring in from the extralegal ports of Novigrad. _Lambert_ grows uneasy, tensing up with each careless bump of a man's hip against their table, while Aiden loosens, his bare arms and brown eyes _unremarkable,_ blending in beautifully with the masses around him.

It is only a matter of time. It is only a matter of time before—

"Witcher!" a drunken, rowdy voice bellows, heavy beer-scented footsteps blundering toward Lambert. A cry goes up: _Witcher, witcher, witcher._ Lambert sets his jaw and meets it head-on.

"Clever. With a face like that, I'd think your right hand's turned you blind by now, but I guess you _can_ see, after all."

"Witcher," the man repeats. He is heavyset, tall, holds himself, as he sways drunkenly in place, like he's ready to start a brawl. "A Wolf witcher!" Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Aiden slip the Cat medallion under his leather breastplate. "Wolf witcher massacred my men at Crow's Perch."

Fucking Geralt. "White hair, shit sense of humor? Face like this?" Lambert contorts his face into a mockery of Geralt's perpetual frown.

The tavern feels smaller as unwashed bodies push in around him, clamoring to hiss and spit at the witcher they've discovered in their midst. Their charming ringleader slops beer down his front as he drinks. "Yeah. Know him?"

"You know, _I_ was taught not to ask stupid questions," Lambert goads. "He's my brother. Honorable streak a mile wide. Your men probably had it coming." He's resigned himself to a fistfight or several on Geralt's behalf. Whatever he did at Crow's Perch, it's not enough for Lambert to sell out his own twisted loyalty.

The man, one hand on his hip, tips his beer over Lambert's head. Hacks for a second and spits. Wheat and hops and saliva drip down Lambert's cheek, pooling in his beard, staining his armor with the smell. The tankard shatters on the floor, exploding into tiny ceramic pieces.

"Witchers have no honor. _You_ have no honor. He killed fifty men, Witcher, and you say they _had it coming._ "

Aiden's voice, deadly quiet. "You want to walk away." Axii laces his voice, venomous and sultry. "You want to apologize, and then leave the tavern."

If he'd asked Lambert, Lambert would have told him _it's no use,_ the guy's too drunk for it to take. As is, he rounds on Aiden. "Fuck off," he announces, and now that both of his hands are free, he takes a swing.

His fist impacts the wall where Aiden's head would have been, and then he drops to the floor, gasping and choking. Lambert sees it in slow motion, on a delay: His wide gut opens up, his insides spilling out, blood gushing. He dies a death with no dignity on the tavern floor, and then all hell breaks loose.

They come at Lambert and Aiden with the intent to kill, now, a self-contained pogrom, stoning their enemies to death with bottles and mugs. Lambert draws his steel sword and slashes laboriously against the press of bodies and groping arms, his mind blank and methodical. He takes down three of them, his only goal to _get to Aiden, find Aiden,_ but as the third body drops, the tavern is quiet.

Aiden stands there, gore-splattered, in the middle of a room littered with butchered bodies. The barmaid's blank eyes stare up at Lambert from behind the counter, an innocent who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. How many of those in this room crowded with corpses would say the same, if they could speak?

Lambert crosses the distance between them with four short strides, and the look Aiden gives him dares to be _coy._ Lambert can feel the way he vibrates in place, shaking free of himself, his Cat medallion loose now and shining red.

They crash together in a tangle of limbs and lips, Aiden's breathy laughter shattering against Lambert's cheek as spit and beer and blood smear between them. They peel each other apart layer by layer until they're naked on the floor, Aiden's legs wound tight around Lambert's waist as they rut frantically. Nails down Lambert's back, and he bites Aiden's neck, _claims_ him as Lambert's own, rakes his teeth across the coarse hair on his chest, laves his tongue across dusky nipples to feel Aiden's breath hitch and his thighs tighten.

"Wolf, my wolf," Aiden coos, throwing Lambert onto his back and climbing sinuously on top of him, stretching himself out to press Lambert down, full-bodied, streaked crimson all over as he undulates. He licks a hot line down the shell of Lambert's ear, breathing out a contented moan. "Lambert," he sighs, his face buried in Lambert's neck, his fingers working behind himself. Lambert fumbles sword oil free from his abandoned trousers and joins Aiden's fingers with his own, oil and blood and Aiden's spit mixing with the wetness of their leaking cocks until he's shoving Lambert back to the floor, lining himself up with Lambert's prick, shouting his exultant laugh to the ceiling as he sinks down and _rides._

"Do you see?" Aiden pants, and Lambert shakes his head, too strung-out on the way blood gleams off of Aiden's olive skin and leaves slick trails behind Lambert's grasping fingers. He grabs hard enough to bruise, spreads Aiden's thighs impossibly wide and raises welts when he scratches long lines from groin to knee, Aiden's hips working faster, his cock red and angry, leaking desperately. Lambert wants to _touch,_ wants to _taste,_ wants to tell him _you come from my cock or you don't come at all,_ all of it at once, and Aiden's pleasure-dazed eyes fall to Lambert's: He knows.

Aiden bends for a lush open-mouthed kiss, tasting of salt and metal, over as suddenly as it begins. He arches back and his hands grips Lambert's shoulders, holding him down, and Aiden _comes,_ head thrown back and toes curling and breath shuddering on a sigh as he grinds his cock sloppily against Lambert's stomach. "Do you see?" he asks again, and Lambert growls, flips them over and chases his own pleasure, _using_ Aiden, lost in his eyes and lips and madness and laughter.

Curses and oaths and a litany of the gods give way to Aiden's name, and Lambert follows, pitching himself over the edge, burying himself in Aiden's warm heat and shaking through orgasm, caught up in Aiden's arms as he goes weak with it.

"Lambert," a sigh, again, Aiden's hips rolling in sweet torment through the aftershocks. "No, stay _here,_ " he says impetuously, twisting a vise grip around Lambert before he can pull out. He's hazy and soft again the instant Lambert concedes, lowering himself to rest his weight against Aiden's chest. " _La petite mort,_ they call this in Toussaint." _The little death._ "Do you see now?"

"You were right," Lambert pants as the pressure fades from uncomfortable to arousing, his heart threatening to spill from him and join the blood on their skin, flooding the floor. "It feels— _gods,_ I'm so _close_ to you—"

"Yes," Aiden whispers, unwinding himself from Lambert and rolling onto his hands and knees in silent invitation. "Again. Be inside me."

_Yes,_ Lambert's mind and heart and body echo, and he obeys.

**

Aiden shuffles his pile of contracts and sighs. "Looks like I'll be doubling back to Oxenfurt. Eighteen hundred coins will keep us in luxury for a year." He passes the notice over to Lambert, who glances down at the careful block lettering. A curse on a duke's daughter: one thousand for lifting the curse, and two hundred each for her four spurned suitors, dead or alive.

"Then I'll find you in Oxenfurt," Lambert agrees with a curt nod. "See you around, Aiden."

"So formal," Aiden teases, his fingertips brushing Lambert's cheek. "I look forward to our next meeting, Lambert." He turns one direction and Lambert the other, and they part ways.

**

When the streets of Oxenfurt are hushed as he passes, Lambert knows something is wrong. Oxenfurt is better than a lot of places, but it is never _quiet,_ the citizens crying out for help or cursing his name as he wends his way through the streets.

He rounds on the first city guard he catches sight of, demanding, "What's going on?"

"T-The Duke of Cheret, he's dead, Master Witcher. They found his body this morning. Murdered in his bed."

Cheret. The duke who posted Aiden's contract. Lambert's stomach drops.

"They know who killed him?"

The guard, a young man out of his depth, probably a reject from the Redanian army, nods his head once, tersely. "A band of slavers came through, humans and elves, and their leader a witcher, too. Screaming, they were, and—wild, Master Witcher, I never seen the like of it. Killed the duke and all 'is men at court, and hared off."

"Which way?" Lambert grits out, and when the answer is too long coming, " _Which way!_ " A yell, the second time, and the guard points downtown.

"Past the school. Toward the Western Gate, I swear I don't know any more..."

If he keeps speaking, Lambert doesn't hear it, his heartbeat loud in his ears as he tracks. He picks up the scents of leather, metal, alcohol, Hanged Man's Venom—four sets of footprints, and one more—

One out ahead.

He _runs._

When he rounds the corner from Oxenfurt proper into the derelict neighborhood by the Western Gate, he sees them. Two humans, an elf, and a witcher, Cat School medallion gleaming, and one more—

_Gods._

The leader of the gang, the Cat witcher, walks up to Lambert, claps a hand amiably on his shoulder. "You'll want to burn the body, good master Wolf. I hate to leave a job unfinished, but the humble Jad Karadin is in high demand." He smiles, the angle of it all wrong, and motions to his gang. They gather around him and walk away, leaving Lambert to rush forward. He falls to his knees.

Aiden is—there's too much _blood,_ tainted with poison, laced with the acrid scent of fear, but he's still breathing, still—

"Lambert," he exclaims with weak delight. "My friend, I simply cannot walk another step."

"Here's as good as anywhere," Lambert answers on a sob, bowing to rest his brow against Aiden's. His skin is already cold, clammy, death's claws gripping him, ready to tear. Lambert's face warms, stinging at the corners of his eyes: the mutagen-faded remnants of the urge to cry. Distantly, he feels himself start to shake, curling in closer, coming apart.

Aiden's breath comes slower, quieter, his traitorous heart pumping out his life with each beat. "My darling." A whisper on thin air. "Listen to me."

His teeth set in a rictus of pain, Lambert nods, his hands gnarled into fists against the earth, his eyes closed and his lips so near to Aiden's—and yet he barely feels the words, spoken on stolen breath.

"They say _we_ have tempers, but what about _you,_ little wolf?" He lifts his jaw to brush their lips, the distortion of a lover's kiss, and falls back to the ground.

Still.

_Gone._

**

**Kaer Morhen, six months later**

Geralt finds Ciri, because Geralt is the kind of person that people come back to, pulled in by his gravity. He brings a battalion of mages and warriors and witchers who love Ciri, and Lambert, who has returned to Kaer Morhen for lack of anywhere else to go, is no exception. He's watched Ciri grow from troublemaking child to stubborn adult, and he places himself on the front lines to protect her, keep her safe and stubborn, although he still has several moments a day when it feels like the air's been sucked from the world.

Mounted on Vesemir's workhorse, Lambert reaches compulsively to his belt, where Aiden's medallion hangs securely, chain wrapped around leather several times.

The air freezes, and the battle begins.

The Wild Hunt rides on Kaer Morhen relentlessly, and Lambert ranges out with Geralt to stymie their approach, cutting through soldiers and hounds, sword chilling until his hands go numb. Geralt tosses bomb after bomb to close the Hunt's portals of entry, stem the flow of Aen Elle, give the others a chance to fortify the keep. When he runs out of bombs, he casts Yrden until he's stumbling with cold and exhaustion, and they have to get _back,_ they have to get back to Kaer Morhen.

Lambert bundles Geralt onto Roach and shoves a Swallow and a White Raff's into his hands with clumsy fingers, and they ride hard back to the keep. Yennefer's strength will be waning, her barriers holding only as long as she does, and Triss and Ermion are powerful but they're also _offense,_ neither of them capable of what Yennefer can do.

The Wild Hunt is coming in through the main gate. That's a problem. "Geralt, close the gates!" He shouts to be heard over the howling wind, and Vesemir yells back, seconding the order. Lambert thunders past Geralt into the lower courtyard, right into a horde of Aen Elle.

_Shit._

"Evening, bastards," he greets them, drawing both swords. Steel for humans, silver for monsters.

_"Lambert!"_ Triss Merigold's voice is thin in the icy gale. _"Lambert! Geralt, save Lambert!"_ Vesemir, this time.

"Geralt, close the gate," Lambert growls, just loud enough to be heard from where Geralt stands indecisive at the base of a ladder to the ramparts. The Aen Elle begin to form ranks, surrounding Lambert. Outnumbering him. Hopelessly, or close to it.

Geralt turns, staggering off toward the gate.

As the Wild Hunt closes in on Lambert, he laughs.

**Author's Note:**

> final "lambert insults geralt" tally: an outlier (should not have been counted)
> 
> please do leave a comment, i love them so~
> 
> i'm on tumblr at [bas-saarebas.](http://bas-saarebas.tumblr.com)


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